HELP! Struggling to move from Intermediate to Upper Intermediate.

I NEED YOUR HELP! I have recently struggling with making the jump from the intermediate lessons to upper intermediate. I'm not sure about everyone else but I feel like there is a much larger jump than from elementary to intermediate.

I have been using Chinesepod for well over a year now and started in the Newbie lessons so I am seeing some progress but I just feel stuck. For those of you who have pushed past intermediate lessons into upper intermediate or above, I would love hearing your thoughts and recommendations on how I should alter my studying.

Currently this is routine for reviewing a lesson:

1) I listen to the podcast lesson several times on my phone during the day to see what works I know or don't know. Anything interesting that catches my ear I immediately look up in Pleco to save for later.

2)In the evening after work I go through the PDF of the lesson and pull out all the vocabulary I am interested in and put them into my Anki deck.

3) I then review my anki deck with the new words.

4)I listen to the lesson one or two more times to see if I can pick up the new words in the dialogue that I missed the first time.

5) Keep reviewing flash cards.

For whatever reason I find the upper intermediate lessons much hard to follow along with using the method above. Perhaps it is because the dialogue is more complex and also longer, but there also seems to be a lot of new words that I am not familiar with.

One thing I should mention is that I haven't focused much on learning characters until recently so my recognition is not up to the same level as my speaking. I'm slowing working on it using Memrise and typing in WeChat but it's slow.

Other than my daily Chinesepod studying I also try to talk with some of my Chinese friends but the discussiosn are relatively general . I also try and watch shows like 非诚勿扰 on the weekends.

I just feel stuck and thought I would approach you all to see if you could help.